Hyde Collection's Rembrandt has colorful history
May 18, 2014 | In the PressFrom PostStar.com (http://poststar.com/news/local/hyde-collection-s-rembrandt-has-colorful-history/article_6f64fba4-decc-11e3-ba87-001a4bcf887a.html (opens in a new window))
The Hyde Collection’s “Christ with Arms Folded,” a work by 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, has forgiven the sins of the past.
The world-renowned oil painting, which depicts a more humanized interpretation of Jesus, has an air of tranquility that belies its turbulent history.
“It’s a truly great Rembrandt. A lot of Rembrandt’s work is awfully dark, and you have to really peer into the painting to get to the portrait,” said Charles Guerin, director of The Hyde Collection. “This one is really wonderful. The lighting on both the face and the hands is luscious. It’s a superb painting.”
But the oil-on-canvas masterpiece is interesting for more than just its artistic merit. The work once belonged to Russian Count Alexander Orloff Davidoff of Petrograd and was likely confiscated during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Ten years later, the painting was vandalized and stolen from the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow.
A 1927 Associated Press article detailed the crime, which involved the theft of five master paintings.
“The vandals ruthlessly cut the canvases from their frames and it is believed ruined them, especially the Rembrandt, of which only a circular portion of the painting was taken,” the article stated.
The rest of the canvas, still in the frame, was “slashed and scarred,” according to the report.
In addition to Rembrandt’s “Christ with Arms Folded,” the thieves made off with religious works by Titian, Antonio da Correggio, Carlo Dolci and Giunta Pisano.
“They treated all the paintings with such vandalism that unless entirely ignorant of their value, they must have been, according to the authorities, seeking some mysterious revenge,” the AP article stated. “More probably, they were some sort of religious maniacs, as all the paintings were portraits of religious subjects.”
The theft happened during an Easter holiday, and the robbers entered the Russian museum by cutting through a glass roof and opening a ventilator.
At the time, recovery seemed unlikely.
Buried treasure
Rembrandt’s “Christ with Arms Folded” was missing for four years. Despite the odds against its return, it was resurrected, along with the other missing works, in 1931.
Although the paintings had been vandalized during the theft, the missing works obviously were valued by some of the parties involved.
“Priceless treasures were restored to the world Tuesday following the discovery of five noted paintings buried in tin cans in two places in Moscow,” a Nov. 17, 1931, Associated Press article stated. “The cans were sealed, and the pictures were covered with a special composition to protect them from damage.”
The article mentioned that several people were arrested, including a Russian painter, for “complicity in the thefts.”
The Russian museum had the work repaired and placed it for sale two years after its recovery.
In 1933, William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of the Arts and an expert on Dutch master painters, informed Louis and Charlotte Hyde, founders of The Hyde Collection, that the painting was available.
“I could of course understand if under the present conditions you could not think about such a purchase, but as I know that you have always been interested in a fine work by Rembrandt, I believe this is an extraordinary opportunity,” Valentiner wrote.
The Hydes traveled to Berlin a few months later with Valentiner to view the painting in person in a Soviet warehouse, where it had been stored a few days before.
“The Russian storeroom was the dreariest, full of disorder, bits of packing and dust, furniture and objects of art, and the dreariness of the man and woman in charge was arresting,” Charlotte Hyde recalled in 1960. “The Rembrandt was brought in. The frame was broken and the picture was dusty and dirty, but I simply said I think it is beautiful.”
The Hydes bartered with the sellers and eventually agreed to pay $33,400 for the work. Later that year, Valentiner visited the family in their Glens Falls home and helped them select the best location to hang the Rembrandt.
The signature work remains in the same spot today.
A stitch in time
When “Christ with Arms Folded” first reached Glens Falls, it was battle-scarred.
“From the time Louis and Charlotte Hyde acquired the painting, it was beset with condition issues, including extensive over-painting throughout the figure. The over-painting was largely the result of the jagged oval form left by thieves who had cut the canvas years before it was acquired by the Hydes. Miraculously, the central image was eventually found and sewn back into the original canvas before the picture was sold to the Hydes in 1933,” said Erin B. Coe, chief curator at The Hyde Collection.
Despite its issues, the Hydes showed foresight about its worth.
“It has suffered through the ages and not been treated with care at every stage. Fortunately, it retains its grandeur,” said Lloyd DeWitt, curator of European art at the Art Gallery of Ontario and editor of the book “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.”
Doreen Alessi, conservator and collections manager at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, is intrigued by the Rembrandt’s provenance. A professional associate with the American Institute for Conservation, Alessi completed an internship and subsequent training at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (Coincidentally, the Massachusetts institution had been the site of a 1990 art heist involving a work by Rembrandt. The crime remains unsolved.)
”That face is just beautiful, and the colors are so rich,” Alessi said of The Hyde’s cherished Rembrandt. “That painting has had one of the most complicated histories a painting could have and not be completely lost.”
Reading through a description of the restoration work from its recovery to today, Alessi is impressed with the painting’s current condition. She speculated on what the Hydes encountered when they first received the painting.
“When you cut a section of a painting away from the rest of the canvas, it will start to fray. The fraying of the canvas starts to happen immediately,” she said.
The original Russian restoration work was heavy-handed, according to Alessi.
“Generally, with modern-day treatments, you would not sew the two pieces of canvas together. The thread itself would be hard to disguise and would create holes in the canvas,” she said.
Alessi explained the problem with over-painting, a common error in early restoration work.
“After the Russians sewed the canvas in place, they needed to fill in all of the missing paint. It’s hard to replicate Rembrandt’s technique. He used layer upon layer of thin glaze, and restorers in the 1930s probably didn’t have his technique perfected,” Alessi said. “Since their painting wouldn’t quite blend in, they would do over-painting to blend their repair with the rest of the painting. I can only imagine that when you looked at it, you would see the face and the hand, and then there would have been this patchy oval that just didn’t match.”
Back to life
According to Coe, the Hydes corrected some of the painting’s issues two decades after buying it.
In 1957, conservator William Suhr in New York City cleaned and re-varnished it.
About 20 years later, the Rembrandt received more extensive work.
“In 1977, the painting was sent to the conservator Morton Bradley in Arlington, Mass., for conservation treatment,” Coe said. “He removed over-paint, conducted selective in-painting and re-varnished the painting. The canvas was relined at this time on a sheet of aluminum, which contributes to its flattened appearance today.”
Although certain aspects of that treatment do not match modern guidelines, Alessi said the conservation work remains impressive.
“I imagine that he had to undo the sewing, then he lined the painting on an aluminum panel, which is no longer done. He probably would have taken the canvas off the stretcher and then had to try to place the frayed ends from the oval cut so that they would meet properly,” she said.
The work would have been extremely precise.
“It’s like a puzzle on a vastly microscopic scale,” Alessi said.
The removal of the over-painting and subsequent in-painting — to fill in the damaged areas from the cut — were expertly done.
“Painting conservation is an extremely slow and delicate process. To remove the over-painting, he would have had to use chemicals that will dissolve paint, so he would have had to be careful not to dissolve the old paint. Then he would have done in-painting to cover his repair. It’s apparent he did a darn good job, because the painting does look beautiful,” Alessi said.
A layer of varnish was added to saturate the color and protect the painting.
Varnish, however, only lasts for a few decades. “Christ with Arms Folded” is up for more conservation work before it becomes part of a future Rembrandt exhibition The Hyde Collection is organizing with the Brigham Young University Museum of Art in Utah.
“The painting is now in need of a re-varnishing, which we are planning to have completed prior to the Rembrandt exhibition in 2015. The biggest challenge with the conservation of this painting is determining whether we can regain the topography in the areas of flattened impasto that resulted from the 1977 relining,” Coe said.
When the painting was adhered to the aluminum panel, pressure flattened Rembrandt’s impasto, or textured brush strokes. Exactly how much restoration work will be done will depend on the results of complex analysis by conservation experts.
“If we wanted to go back and change the painting now, it would be a vast amount of work,” Dewitt said. “It represents an earlier age of how to deal with old canvas support. We wouldn’t do that now. The main thing we are concerned about is stability, not change.”
King of kings
The Hyde is considered a world-class art institution, and a major part of its glory is Rembrandt’s portrait of Jesus, one of three works by the Dutch master in the permanent collection.
“The Rembrandt ‘Christ with Arms Folded’ is the cornerstone of the collection at The Hyde as well as our most well-known work,” Coe said. “I believe the purchase of the Rembrandt in 1933 marked a milestone in the formation of The Hyde’s collection as it signified the first major step toward their intention to found an art museum in Glens Falls. The painting, of course, blended in perfectly with the other Old Masters in their collection, including work by Van Dyck, Rubens and Tintoretto.”
Guerin finds that visitors are surprised when they come across the painting.
“People are often startled to see it. It’s not a small painting. It’s a big painting, and people are stunned. They often ask if it is the real thing — if it is a real Rembrandt. People don’t expect to find that name in Glens Falls,” he said.
The attraction goes beyond name recognition.
“It’s an amazingly beautiful painting, and people respond to that. They enjoy it and spend time with it,” Guerin said.
Painted between 1657 and 1661, the image of Christ was completed near the end of Rembrandt’s life. Unlike many religious works, which glorify their subjects, the painting depicts Jesus as a simple man.
“Rembrandt has transformed the son of God into a compassionate figure, human and vulnerable, forcing us to empathize with him rather than worship him,” Coe said.
For DeWitt, the painting is memorable for both its beauty and its history.
“It’s a famous piece because it has such a great story. It has the whole Russian thing — the cloak and dagger Lenin factor. There’s the theft and repair, and then again, it is this main, great, late Rembrandt image of Jesus,” DeWitt said.
In the world of art, where paintings disappear, never to be seen again, “Christ with Arms Folded” seems to have been protected by a divine intervention.
“The whole thing is a miracle. It’s absolutely a fabulous story,” Alessi said. “It would have been a real tragedy to have had this painting lost to history.”
